DREAM TIME
(collective and private chimeras)
NEW CIRCADIA
The House of Dreams -installation drawing, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (2005)
…Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however did not disturb me so much as the expansion of time. I sometimes seem to have lived of seventy or a hundred years in one night, nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience…
–The Philosophy of Sleep, Robert Macnish, 1830
...In ancient dream incubation, ritual sleep hatched potent dreams that diagnosed the dreamer, initiated her in special wisdom, or served as oracles. As had been suggested, the simplest way to classify incubation is as a special subset of oneiromancy, divination through dreams…
A Great and Strange Intentionality, Locality, and Epiphany in the Category of Dream Incubation, Kimberly C. Patton, 2004
Western medical and scientific studies, oscillating between a psychological or a physiological locus for dreaming, has consistently reinforced a cultural assumption of dreaming as a solitary experience. To reveal dreams is to identify pathologies or instabilities. Yet, among ancient and non-western cultures, dream sharing not only offered a means to highlight a medical condition and its cure, it also served to connect, and to prophesize.
For the ancient Greeks, the designated space for this collective dreaming was the Asclepion, a ritualized complex of sanctuaries and temples overseen by the god Asclepious and organized explicitly for fostering dream incubation, therapeutic sleep, prophetic dreaming, and medicinal healing. The site of the original Asclepia was the cave where, as a natural temple, the magical contact with stone would place one in direct correspondence with the deities, facilitating the curative and therapeutic dream states.
EVENTS
Film Screening, Friday, March 27
Street of Crocodiles (1986)
A stop-motion animated short about a puppet freed from his strings to wander a desolate world.
Director: Timothy Quay, 21min.
Institute Benjamenta (1996)
A young man goes to school to learn the servants' trade, only to rebel against his training. Shot in expressive, dreamlike black and white.
Directors: Timothy Quay and Stephen Quay, 1hr. 45min.
Ongoing Event
Oneiroi - an installation
In Greek mythology, dreams were sometimes personified as Oneiros or Oneiroi (plural)… in Hesiod’s Theogony, the Oneiroi are the sons of Nyx (Night), and brothers of Hypnos (Sleep).
Oneiros in Wikipedia
Oneiroi is an ongoing participatory project that connects a webpage with two auditory spaces – stations – set on the ledge of the Daniels Gallery. It contains narrations of people’s dreams. The webpage records them in a public, virtual field; the two stations record or play these dreams back to gallery visitors.
Oneiroi is an evolution of dreamgrove.org, a 2008 multimedia work broadcasting dreams through a webpage, app, and a series of interactive (data) gardens. Based on theories of memory and mental mapping, Oneiroi combine the digital and the physical via a series of narratives (Logs), audio environments (Stations) and cartographies (an Atlas), transforming private texts into public space.
Oneiroi instigate the logging, recollection and sharing of anonymous or authored memories. They tap into a networked unconscious, create a surreal break from reality, and give to speaking, listening and dreaming locus and agency.
Concept & Design: Petros Babasikas, Chrissoula Voulgari
Development: CODE ETC
Installation Team: Marienka Bishop-Kovac, Phat Le
Petros Babasikas is an architect, writer and educator. His work explores connections among architecture, storytelling, media and public space. He is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. His research includes the public space investigation 6 Place Toronto, “Urban/Commoning,” a Mediterranean DIY urbanism project, and The Tourists, a traveling exhibition on the intersection of Global Migrations and Tourism. Petros is founder of Drifting City studio in Athens Greece, where he has designed urban and cultural spaces and public installations including the Webby Award-winning webpage/interactive garden dreamgrove.org, recording and broadcasting individual dreams in a public field. Petros holds a BA in Architecture and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a Masters of Architecture from Princeton University.
Chrissoula Voulgari is an artist living and working between Toronto and Athens.
Participatory Performance, Thursday, February 6
Dream Parliament: An Exercise in the Democracy of Sleep
An evening of discussion, organized by Matthew Spellberg with the help of David Leo Rice, about the long history and possible future of dream-sharing, with some case studies and experimental exercises. The Dream Parliament is an introduction to some of the many strategies by which dreams have been negotiated and enlivened so as to become a part of waking life; a discussion of some of the last refuges for dream-sharing in the present, including among Arctic hermits and spiritual recluses; and a demonstration of some old and new dream-sharing techniques. Often when we talk about dreams now, we think about interpreting them, but this event looks instead at the possibility of full immersion in the dream-world of others — its places, feelings, colors, smells, movements, and gestures. Also considered are the political complexities and democratic urgency of building a communal vision of reality from the raw material of the individual imagination. Audience participation is integral to the Dream Parliament.
